Broadband performance of time -reversing arrays in shallow water.

Abstract

Active acoustic time reversal is the process of recording the signal from a remote source with a transducer array, and then replaying the signal in a time-reversed fashion to retro-direct the replayed sound back to the remote source to form a retrofocus, in an unknown environment. Time-Reversing Arrays (TRAs) perform well in the absence of acoustic absorption losses and temporal changes in the environment when there is sufficient array aperture and high signal-to-noise ratio. Future active sonar and underwater communication systems for use in unknown shallow ocean waters may be developed from the automatic spatial and temporal focusing properties of TRAs. The performance of TRAs can be determined by four criteria: the size, the longevity and the field amplitude of the array's retrofocus, as well as the correlation of the retrofocus signal with a time-reversed version of the original signal. Four issues related to TRAs performance are investigated in this thesis: (i) the impact of noise, (ii) the influence of array and source motion, (iii) the effects of oceanic currents, and (iv) the effectiveness of blind deconvolution of the original signal via artificial time-reversal. Noise influences TRA performance twice because the array both listens and transmits. Degradation of TRA's performance caused by noise in the acoustic environment is investigated through an analytical formulation that can be reduced to an algebraic relationship for a simple noise model. Numerical experiments that illustrate this effort are also shown. Another limitation of TRA performance is the Doppler effect induced by the dynamic source-array configuration or the moving medium. Normal modes and parabolic equation simulations illustrate these influences for various oceanic waveguides and array geometry. Finally a novel blind deconvolution technique, artificial time-reversal (ATR), is developed for providing an estimate of an unknown source signal propagating in an unknown shallow oceanic waveguide. A synthesized green's function is computed by taking advantage of the modal propagation features of a shallow oceanic waveguide, notably the independence of the phase velocity of the low order modes on the frequency for signal bandwidth of interest far from the mode cut-off frequency. Conditions and limitations are investigated using numerical simulations and experimental data recorded in the Mediterranean sea.